The present invention relates to cloud computing, and more specifically, to a method and a system for handling locale in a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a business mode offering a platform as a service. A PaaS provider can provide platform level products such as operating systems, application servers, and application development environments through the internet as a service to a user. Via the PaaS service, a software developer can develop and deploy a new application without purchasing platform software.
An application available over the internet, for example a web application, needs to be deployed to an application server which, in turn, executes on an operating system; the operating system, in turn, executes in a hardware environment. Both the application server and the operating system are platform level products. In a cloud computing environment, hardware can be provided as a service through Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the required hardware environment provided by a virtualized infrastructure, such as a virtual machine. A PaaS cloud computing platform integrates the functions of the application server and the operating system allowing a user to directly develop and deploy his own application on the cloud computing platform without having to build his own platform.
In order to run a user's application on the cloud computing platform, the cloud computing platform analyzes the application pushed by the user to the cloud computing platform to determine the application type and to prepare a corresponding runtime environment appropriate for that application type. The cloud computing platform may also install any applications on which the application depends (dependencies) and may package the application, the runtime environment, and the dependent applications into an executable droplet that it stores in the cloud system. This process is referred to as “staging”. The module for staging the application on a cloud computing platform is referred to as a “stager”.
When an application is executed on the cloud computing platform, a “runner” module on the cloud computing platform retrieves and extracts the executable droplet to initialize, or boot, the runtime environment, start the application and any dependencies.
With ever increasing diversity and complexity of applications, existing stagers and/or runners may not satisfy the needs of some application or some users. Therefore, it is advantageous to make extend the capabilities of and make improvements to existing stagers and/or runners.